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A Private History of Awe
A Private History of Awe
A Private History of Awe
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A Private History of Awe

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An original and searching memoir from "one of America's finest essayists" (Phillip Lopate)

When Scott Russell Sanders was four, his father held him in his arms during a thunderstorm, and he felt awe—"the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and everything." He says, "The search for communion with this power has run like a bright thread through all my days." A Private History of Awe is an account of this search, told as a series of awe-inspiring episodes: his early memory of watching a fire with his father; his attraction to the solemn cadences of the Bible despite his frustration with Sunday-school religion; his discovery of books and the body; his mounting opposition to the Vietnam War and all forms of violence; his decision to leave behind the university life of Oxford and Harvard and return to Indiana, where three generations of his family have put down roots. In many ways, this is the story of a generation's passage through the 1960s—from innocence to experience, from euphoria to disillusionment. But Sanders has found a language that captures the transcendence of ordinary lives while never reducing them to formula. In his hands, the pattern of American boyhood that was made classic by writers from Mark Twain to Tobias Wolff is given a powerful new charge.

Editor's Note

Pulsing with intensity...

Sanders’ memoir pulses with an almost religious intensity. He’s one of our most acclaimed essayists, and it’s easy to see why in his writing about his boyhood in the 60s and learning to open himself up to experience.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 15, 2007
ISBN9780374707996
A Private History of Awe
Author

Scott Russell Sanders

Scott Russell Sanders has won more than a dozen major honors, including the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award twice, the Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His more than twenty books include novels, stories, and essays. He is a distinguished professor emeritus of English at Indiana University and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife make their home in the hardwood hill country of southern Indiana.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm a great fan of libraries. I rarely read a book that I want to buy, but this book fits in that category. It's just beautifully written. Now that I've read it completely I want to purchase it so that I can take it off the shelf, open it to any page to read and enjoy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Scott Russell Sanders spent his first five years on a small farm outside of Memphis where the natural world taught him some of his earliest lessons and an older boy awakened him to racial prejudice. He was also awakened to an atmosphere of shame as his parents fought over his father’s problem with alcohol. Later, Sanders falls in love with science along with a girl from Indiana named Ruth, his future wife. But, he turns from physics to the study of literature and discovers a way to articulate his experiences with awe. Sanders writes eloquently of his overwhelming love of family and the natural world. Between his reflections on the cycle of decline and renewal, his mother’s disappearance into Alzheimer’s disease and his baby granddaughter’s awakening to the world, he tells the important stories in his life’s journey. An author of essays and novels, Sanders teaches on the faculty of Indiana University.

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A Private History of Awe - Scott Russell Sanders

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